Category: Systems Thinking

Does cucumber suck?

I’ve been having a lot of rants about Cucumber of late, as it’s the new shiny thing for agile teams.  Does anyone else have issues with it?  I’ve asked all of my programmer friends to convince me of its worth, and they’ve all failed so far.  I’ve not seen it adding any value above building […]

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The Onion predicts the future once again!

The Onion shows off their systems-thinking skills once more. Compare this article on predictive sentence completion with The Onion’s Mac Wheel features at around the one minute mark in the video at http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary. Other clairvoyant articles are here and here. Find your own here.

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Requirements and specifications: What's the difference and what's it to you?

There have been a number of threads I have followed in a few different forums recently where people have discussed requirements, what it means for requirements to be ‘good’, and what it might mean for requirements to be unambiguous. What usually follows is a long-winded back and forth, with no resolution. At the heart of […]

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Planning to make use of learning – Incremental vs Iterative

During coffee with Agile-coach and all-round excellent guy Shane Clauson, in sympathy with yet another of my what’s-wrong-with-agile rants, he pointed me to this blog post from Jeff Patton: Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it While my opinions diverge on some of what he says must be true, I […]

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What's in a name?

There seems to be a flurry of post-agile activity on blogs right now. If you haven’t noticed, you can look at an example here. There is more elsewhere, and Jonathan Kohl tells me there is more coming. What this amounts to is a growing number of people who, for a variety of reasons, have a […]

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Study session difficulties, or the Learning Organisation challenge

In the Yahoo group supporting Cem Kaner’s Black Box Software Testing course, Anil Soni has been describing experiences organising and leading internal training, using the BBST course materials. One point in particular caught my attention: > The major challenge is to have all the testers together in the same time > needed for the group […]

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Models of software development

After an email exchange with Matt Heusser, Matt has posted my comments on how our work tools sometimes influence our behaviour on projects. That’s because these work tools are based on models of how someone believe software should be developed. Perhaps more importantly, the tools that I’ve seen are usually designed to ensure that the […]

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Investing for maintenance – Tradeoffs and calculations

In the context-driven software testing Yahoo group, there has been an interesting thread on magic numbers. Part of this discussion related to magic numbers for software maintenance investment. While I think you can find plenty of literature that advises a bias towards maintenance, my friend Michael couldn’t find any models that satisfied our burning questions, […]

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